And so, the brave new blue dawn on Friday was obscured by dark clouds of disappointment. The new era of Les Bleus under Laurent Blanc stuttered to a home defeat against lowly Belarus. Tomorrow evening, they must pick themselves up and win on hostile territory against Bosnia, arguably the strongest team in the group. No easy task when all three strikers used on Friday are now injured…
We are also biting our nails about travel problems tomorrow. The national journée de mobilisation against pension and retirement reforms is likely to include some action by air traffic controllers. Learning this on the evening news last night threw us into a bit of a panic, given that a Caribbean holiday is in the balance if we don't make it to Gatwick by Tuesday evening. Two options presented themselves:
a) hope our flight is unaffected, turn up at the airport tomorrow morning, with a long drive and ferry from Dover as an emergency backup plan if the flight is cancelled.
b) rebook our flight for the evening flight today.
Both choices risk costing in excess of 300 euros, and occasioned much internet searching, much anxious cussing and ranting, and a hasty bit of early packing. In the end I gave in to common sense and took la bienheureuse's advice: on calling Easyjet (no easy task as they do their level best to hide the call centre number on their web site - cue more cussing and ranting), I was told that flights from Lyon would be unaffected and that the Gatwick flight was certain to go. Hoorah. Revert to plan A. The Easyjet web site this morning appears to confirm that the Gatwick flight is going, though three other flights outbound from Lyon are cancelled tomorrow. All fingers tightly crossed…
The weekend otherwise was very pleasant. Warm sunshine induced us out to lunch on Sunday, pizza and salad at La Pie riverside restaurant, followed by a stroll up river to La Cité Internationale to watch the special version of the most successful film of all time, la bienheureuse being the one person in the whole of France not to have seen the original.
